Five Hot Prospects on the UW Faculty, from Engineering Dean Matt O’Donnell

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that Gao, an assistant professor of bioengineering, has expertise in synthesizing complex nanotech structures that are essential ingredients for creating sharper diagnostic medical images. These chemical units can be linked to antibodies, which can seek out a particular structure on a cell, like a biomarker for cancer. This can allow the antibodies to “light up” under the glare of an MRI machine, as deep as two centimeters under the skin. Once you know precisely where the diseased cells are, it is easier to direct targeted therapy, O’Donnell says.

This kind of improved “contrast agent” for imaging is obviously near and dear to the Dean’s heart. “I’m an imaging guy, and we’re always looking for help with better contrast agents,” he says. Plus, he says, Gao is a fun personality to work with.

Tadayoshi “Yoshi” Kohno

Kohno, a cybersecurity expert, joined the faculty of the UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering in 2006. He first gained national attention as a graduate student at UC San Diego. That’s where he exposed security weaknesses in Diebold voting machines that made them vulnerable to fraud, which got him an invitation to testify before Congress. In his first year at UW, he and his colleagues showed that a Nike running shoe, embedded with chips that send a wireless signal to an iPod to track how far and fast people run, could be hacked into by stalkers or thieves to track people’s movements.

This sort of cybersecurity research has a number of potential applications, including helping people find stolen laptop computers, and protecting wireless signals given off by implantable medical devices, O’Donnell says.

Magdalena “Magda” Balazinska

Balazinska, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, is researching the use of databases for cloud computing to better enable collaborations, O’Donnell says. One of her recent projects has been to study a wireless monitoring system for people inside a building (which sounds awfully Big Brother-like to my ear). Balazinska, in this in-house write-up, said one of her goals is to see what benefits can come from such a system while protecting people’s privacy.

Guozhong Cao

Time was running out on our 30-minute meeting, but O’Donnell still had to think of one last up-and-comer from the world of cleantech. He named Cao, pronounced like “Chow.” This professor is a little more senior than the others O’Donnell named, but his work made headlines last fall as the founding technology for Seattle-based startup EnerG2.